Ojuice5001

Once, during his atheist phase, he said he was convinced that all mythologies "are just fiction--Christ as much as Loki."

People abandon convinced atheism. Deal with it.

[ November 28, 2002: Message edited by: Ojuice5001 ]</p>

Vorkosigan

LOL. Not to change the subject, but how goes the conversion to Orthodoxy?

Albion

Isn't Miracles the one that had to have a chapter rewritten after Elizabeth Anscombe gave a public demonstration about why it was based on a false premise?

Odemus

Yes Albion it was. In fact that incident plagued Lewis to the end of his life.

luvluv

Vork:

Prove it.

Prove it.

Again, why should I accept your empty assertions of unproven philosohpy over Lewis's?

Science certainly has not, and certainly CAN NOT discover whether or not there are worlds external to ours. Science certainly has not, and certainly CAN NOT discover whether it is the ultimate engagement with the world. That is a philosophical statement ABOUT science, not a discovery of science. It's very pleasant to know that you believe it, unfortunately you can't back it up anymore than Lewis can back up his, they are naked philosophical predispositions.

Well then I suggest you do read it before you decide that Lewis did not understand unbelievers.

Please, Vork. You are better than this, surely. On the one hand you admit that Lewis is a brilliant writer of fantasy fiction, and then you say that he is not capable of intentially creating characters who are pompous and self-important (two words which were never used to describe C.S. by people who knew him)? Look, maybe you just don't like the book or the man, but still these types of comments are just silly. Why not dislike the book and leave it at that? Or just like it without all the armchair psycho-babble about where the humour came from.

And you aren't implicitly lying when you are pretending to know Lewis mental state when you know you don't know what they were? I mean, the irony is all over your post. You are doing everything you are accusing Lewis of doing.

lpetrich:

lpetrich ought to tell me where that law is written that some Christians can't have doctrines which are out of step with mainstream Christian theology. He also needs to tell me how this disproves that mainstream Christian theology is still mainstream Christian theology, even if some tiny factions occasionally go off the reservation. Given this, lpetrich ought to tell me what this statement has to do with what we are discussing at all.

Vorkosigan

Again, why should I accept your empty assertions of unproven philosohpy over Lewis's?

Because, Lewis is the one doing the asserting. There's no evidence that suggests that there is some reality beyond or behind the one we currently inhabit. Lewis has to make his case, which he certainly does not. So far, there is no evidence of reality beyond ours...and....

Science certainly has not, and certainly CAN NOT discover whether or not there are worlds external to ours.

Of course it can, and has. In the uncovering of how humans think, science has begun to show that the idea of a reality beyond ours, or that the universe has a purpose, is fallout from the cognitive equipment built into humans by evolution.

Once an explanation is provided, the question is answered. If people choose not to accept that explanation, that is their affair. To date, however, all evidence is consistent with the assertion "there is no reality beyond the one we inhabit in the everyday world."

Science certainly has not, and certainly CAN NOT discover whether it is the ultimate engagement with the world. That is a philosophical statement ABOUT science, not a discovery of science. It's very pleasant to know that you believe it, unfortunately you can't back it up anymore than Lewis can back up his, they are naked philosophical predispositions.

Alas, they are not. Did you see my post on evolutionary naturalism? Like I said above, once you can start to begin to see how humans go about constructing their world, you can begin to see why there is no reality beyond this one.

But here's my "philosophical" position laid out succintly.

• Here's something I wrote a while back on this very topic, cribbed from Giere, of course, with some additions of my own.
  
  "Let's start out with a one-sentence summary: naturalism, when you come right down to it, is the belief that consciousness cannot operate directly on reality outside the mind.
  
  As far as my particular naturalist beliefs, I am an evolutionary naturalist. Human cognitive capacities are evolved capacities, just like those of other animals. It is undeniable that human abilities are well-adapted to the world in which humans function, and that these capacities are non-trivial. A fantastic amount of processing power is required just to walk or read a poem.
  
  Empiricist philosophers have emphasized the role of perceptual experience in their analyses of knowledge because of the high degree of subjective certainty attached to such experience. The problem was then to get beyond this subjective experience. From an evolutionary perspective, there's a connection between subjective certainty and the objective reliability of our interactions with the world. Although the evolutionary history of some of these capacities for developing reliable perceptions of world is still in the dark, there's no denying the reliability of our perceptions.
  
  Traditional rationalism has focused on these subjective intuitions we have, that space-time is 3D and that time is linear. These judgements seem to be built into the way we think. Indeed, they seem to be (see Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution), since those aspects of the world relevant to our fitness have that structure. But rationalists, like empiricists, are still stuck with the problem of subjectivity. From their perspective, it seems impossible that one could ever discover what science has indeed discovered, that the cosmos has several dimensions, and so forth.
  
  Evolutionary theory provides an alternative. By looking back at their own evolutionary history, scientists can better understand their own cognitive situation and investigate the development of their own cognitive capacities. We know already that we have reliable perceptions about the world; the problem of induction is really twofold, not just "how is it we can induct" but "how is it our inductions are so reliable?" The reply to Hume is contained in modern cognitive science, which has shown that inductive capacities are built into humans (and other animals). So are things like logic, the idea that things in the world have intentions, and so on. Most of these originate in the cognitive equipment necessary for competition in our highly developed social world. If you look at the Primer on Evolutionary Psychology I provided above you'll get a few simple examples of how logic (in that case, conditionals) operates in human social systems.
  
  In other words, the cognitive view starts with the realization that our perceptions are largely reliable, wonders why this is so, and then uses the tools of science to discover why, confirming that indeed our perceptions our reliable.
  
  Some of you I know are shouting "Hey wait! This is circular!" I would argue, as I think Wittgenstein did, that epistemology has been gripped by the idea that one must prove in Straight Lines. The philosopher reasons from first principles, then, grounded in A, moves on to B. The cognitive scientist starts with B and using B, goes back to find what A is all about. Circularity does not exist here, because at each iteration of the scientific process, something has changed: we have more knowledge about ourselves and the world. This is not circularity, but a positive feedback loop. Using our powerful cognitive abilities made reliable by evolution, we expand our knowledge of the world, thus understanding our own cognitive abilities better. This new knowledge enables us to better understand the world. And so on. As Giere noted in Explaining Science : A Cognitive Approach(Science and Its Conceptual Foundations) "the existence of these positive feedback loops is not a limitation that must be overcome by some special form of philosophical analysis. On the contrary, it is one of the things that makes modern science so powerful."
  
  I don't worry too much about what philosophy says about ontology or epistemology, because those answers are going to come from the cognitive sciences. That has pretty much been the trend over the last 300 years; that the realm of philosophy is being invaded and colonized by the sciences. Although philosophy is incredibly good as a poser of questions for the cognitive sciences to answer."

This idea that you have that my position is "philosophical" is in fact false. Nothing could be further from the truth. My position is based on the latest data coming out of the cognitive sciences. If you want to keep claiming that there is something out there beyond this, that's fine, but providing evidence is up to you. You're in exactly the same position as the person who claims there is an invisible pink unicorn in the corner of this room. Until you lay up some evidence, there isn't one.

Luv wrote:
Please, Vork. You are better than this, surely. On the one hand you admit that Lewis is a brilliant writer of fantasy fiction, and then you say that he is not capable of intentially creating characters who are pompous and self-important (two words which were never used to describe C.S. by people who knew him)? Look, maybe you just don't like the book or the man, but still these types of comments are just silly. Why not dislike the book and leave it at that? Or just like it without all the armchair psycho-babble about where the humour came from.

Let's take this one at a time:

On the one hand you admit that Lewis is a brilliant writer of fantasy fiction, and then you say that he is not capable of intentially creating characters who are pompous and self-important (two words which were never used to describe C.S. by people who knew him)?

Where did I say that he was not intentionally capable of creating characters who were self-important? I said that, in Screwtape, much of the unintentional humor comes from the way the demons sound like Lewis when he is apologizing for Jesus. Lewis may well have intended it so, but he has never struck me as a writer with a penchant for self-parody, though as a person he seems to have been warm, funny and generous, and not socially inept as he was portrayed in Shadowlands. Thus, there is no contradiction here.....a writer's persona and his personal life are often totally unrelated.

Look, maybe you just don't like the book or the man, but still these types of comments are just silly. Why not dislike the book and leave it at that? Or just like it without all the armchair psycho-babble about where the humour came from.

But I just told you I loved the book! I like Screwtape very much -- it has some great humor, some good digs, both intentional and unintentional. The humor is not armchair psychobabble -- you asked me why it was humorous. But "humor" is in the eye of the beholder.....You may not find it humorous for the same reasons I do.

The problem is that you keep pressing me on Lewis, whose writing is excellent, but whose thinking is often absurdly bad, and I keep supplying you with reasons why I don't like or disagree with him, and it pisses you off. I am not the one incapable of rational discussion of Lewis. You are the one with the strong emotional investment here.

And you aren't implicitly lying when you are pretending to know Lewis mental state when you know you don't know what they were? I mean, the irony is all over your post. You are doing everything you are accusing Lewis of doing.

Where is the lie? I am bluntly and clearly stating my conclusions regarding Lewis' mental state. These conclusions may be right or wrong, but there are no lies stating what I think. The lie in Lewis is that he wrote really dumb stuff (like the Trilemma), or blatant logical fallacies (as I pointed out in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000067&p=" target="_blank">our last conversation</a> about him) that, in order to construct them, he must have known what he was doing. In other words, Lewis was either lying or engaged in a fantastic effort at double-think on many different levels. As Lewis would say: "He didn't give us any choice."

Finally, your whole post is an attack on me as a person, and not a defense of Lewis. Whether or not I am completely depraved and hypocritical, you still have to answer the fundamentally anti-human stance of Lewis assertion of the world as the locus of evil. You "defended" this position by simply restating and elaborating it. There is, essentially, no answer for that, which is why you have taken to desperately attempting to show I am a hypocrite.

Take this sentence, from <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~abrwsf/events/stletter_01.html" target="_blank">letter 1</a>:
"Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences."

Note that Lewis builds a dichotomy here. But this very dichotomy itself is evil. There is no distinction between "universals" and "the stream of immediate sense experiences," at least the kind of distinction Lewis is creating....they are two aspects of the same thing. It looks innocuous, but the end result of focusing on "higher things" is always higher body counts.

Or take <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~abrwsf/events/stletter_02.html" target="_blank">letter 2</a>

In this letter the potential atheist is presented as shallow, snobbish, and arrogant.

• "Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous."

But nobody ever believes a religion ridiculous on grounds like that. Most atheists here are either adult converts who deconverted from religion because of its blatant hypocrisy and evil, or, like me, gave up on religion at a young age (11), long before we acquired any ideas like the one Lewis outlines above. This is simply the typical Lewis format of constructing a strawman to assure his readers that they are decent people, warm, friendly, humane, humble. It's sheer compensatory fantasy. At its worst, it is overt acceptance of the fact that in order to be a Christian, one must engage in constant monitoring of one's of thoughts....the brilliance of religion, as opposed to nationalism or Communism, is that it is extremely effective in getting people to internalize this system of thought control.

Present discussion aside, speaking of Lewis, are you aware of <a href="http://www.lindentree.org/" target="_blank">The C.S. Lewis Hoax</a>. Purely for informational purposes, I thought you might be interested.

Vorkosigan

[ November 28, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

HelenM

The Trilemma says, in effect: "Jesus claimed to be God therefore he was either a lunatic, a liar or Lord".

It's not illogical, imo, so much as Lewis doesn't acknowledge "Jesus claimed to be God" is based on the assumption that he really did claim that. If the assumption is wrong, the Trilemma is invalidated. And I think many people here would have problems with the assumption.

I think you are reading much more into this than Lewis intended. He doesn't say that this is sufficient grounds to reject Christianity. He's drawing on what I think is a correct observation about humans - that they can be irrational - to point out that people do sometimes let irrational reasons put them off something.

I expect you'd like to believe that no atheist has any irrational reasons in their list of why they reject Christianity.

On the other hand, I see things on these boards regularly that argue otherwise.

The thread that ridiculed the appearance of some members of the Baptist Board indicates to me that Lewis is quite right in observing that some people do irrationally equate casting aspersions on the adherents of a religion, with showing its beliefs to be erroneous.

If all the threads on these boards were against Christian belief rather than against personal characteristics or choices of Christians, such as choice of clothing or photo chosen on a bulletin board, that tell us nothing whatsoever about the validity of the beliefs those people hold, then I think you could make a better case. However, when I read here I find many things which indicate Lewis is right - that people do include irrational objections among their reasons why they reject Christianity i.e. there's no obvious connection between the objection and the validity of the belief system objected to. I'm not saying that those irrational objections are necessarily the entire 'grounds' of their rejection. But nor was Lewis. He is only pointing out that irrational grounds can be part of the list of objections - because people are prone to be irrational.

In fact 'people are prone to being irrational' comes up a lot in his books, as I recall, implicitly and explicitly. Which I see as a helpful and accurate observation. I suppose you could turn that back on him and call his theism irrational. Whatever. But I don't think he was dishonest in the way you alleged; I don't believe he knew he was writing things that are wrong. I do think he realized that attempts at rational apologetics aren't effective when people are being irrational and that that's what he was thinking of, to the extent he showed awareness that no apologetics, including his own, are guaranteed to persuade non-believers.

Helen

Amen-Moses

So it was in the right place then?

My local library has all Christian apologetic stuff in the pseudo science/conspiracy section (in with crop circles, roswell, palmestry etc), other religious books are in the history/archeology (Norse/Hindu gods for example)or philosophy sections (Zen/Tao etc). Strange way of doing things I thought but nobody seems to complain.

Amen-Moses

Vorkosigan

I think you are reading much more into this than Lewis intended. He doesn't say that this is sufficient grounds to reject Christianity. He's drawing on what I think is a correct observation about humans - that they can be irrational - to point out that people do sometimes let irrational reasons put them off something.

But the point is that the demons have constructed this idea of people who reject religion. Now be honest....do you know anyone who rejects religion on the grounds that CS Lewis poses there? It's easy to say he's talking about "irrational" but he's actually describing mere class snobbery.

I expect you'd like to believe that no atheist has any irrational reasons in their list of why they reject Christianity.

No, but that is not Lewis' point, really.

The thread that ridiculed the appearance of some members of the Baptist Board indicates to me that Lewis is quite right in observing that some people do irrationally equate casting aspersions on the adherents of a religion, with showing its beliefs to be erroneous.

Ummmm, no. I doubt any participant on that thread rejects religion because the Baptist Board posters look a certain way. I expect you'll find their reasons for rejecting religion are a bit more well-thought out.

necessarily the entire 'grounds' of their rejection. But nor was Lewis. He is only pointing out that irrational grounds can be part of the list of objections - because people are prone to be irrational.

Then why isn't that in the passage?

dishonest in the way you alleged; I don't believe he knew he was writing things that are wrong. I do think he realized that attempts at rational apologetics aren't effective when people are being irrational and that that's what he was thinking of, to the extent he showed awareness that no apologetics, including his own, are guaranteed to persuade non-believers.

I think you credit him with too much here. I believe he was writing things he knew to be wrong; one of his mentors was an atheist and an extremely rational man. Look at letter 2 in its entirety. Where does Lewis really grapple with the problem of irrationality?

Vorkosigan

HelenM

I already said I don't think CS Lewis is saying people reject religion solely on the grounds described in that passage.

It seems that we aren't going to agree on what the passage implies.

We aren't agreeing on what his point is, are we?

I wouldn't know but I don't think CS Lewis is saying people reject religion solely based on the appearance of others, either.

It is, implicitly, imo. And I found it in the letter explicitly once I looked at the whole thing (see below).

How about right here?

Partway through letter 2 he writes:

"I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment."

That seems pretty clear to me!

Helen

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: HelenM ]</p>